S&P Global Platts, a division of S&P Global providing information and benchmark prices for the commodities and energy markets, has announced the deployment a proprietary, secure blockchain network.

The full scale commercial deployment of the blockchain technology has been developed by S&P Global Platts, in collaboration with FOIZ, FEDCom and the 11 terminal operators that use the flagship Middle Eastern facility. It will allow market participants to submit weekly inventory oil storage data to Fujairah Oil Industry Zone (FOIZ) and the regulator, FEDCom.

“Built on the opensource hyperledger Fabric framework, S&P Global Platts has developed a permissioned submissions environment where terminal operators submit data to FEDCom through smart contracts on individual private channels. FEDCom in turn runs a second smart contract, with an automatic command to calculate and submit data to S&P Global Platts on a public channel. This provides additional security and convenience for terminal operators,” S&P Global Platts said in its media release.

The new solution offers FOIZ and its port operators security, ease of use, and a full audit trail to collate weekly inventory oil products storage data. It improves the existing manual and unstructured process by which the terminal operators communicate their weekly inventory numbers to FEDCom. In addition, it also reduces the scope for human error by eliminating the need for FEDCom to undertake manual validation and aggregation of each terminal operator's numbers.

"We believe our project, in conjunction with our partners in Fujairah, represents a first for oil markets by offering a full Blockchain deployment to provide market participants with data that is increasingly critical in the region and to the global oil markets,” James Rilett, Senior Director of Innovation and Digital Strategy, S&P Global Platts said.

Similar to the current structure, FEDCom will have sole access to all individual terminal operator numbers and will submit only the approved aggregated weekly numbers to S&P Global Platts for global distribution.